GK is a school course in Indian schools. I first was introduced to it when I was staying with Gibi’s family and helping Jugal with homework. I’d been puzzled by the questions he seemed to be studying, one day movie stars, and the next day flags of different countries… seemingly random questions and subject matter. Well, that’s what it is, random, and what you would study if you were preparing for a general quiz. Quizzes are very popular here. This year is the first year the girls are studying in English, so I am more able to see what they have to learn. I’m working with all their subjects to help them find ways to learn, remember more, get higher grades (that’s being blunt). They are capable of doing better than they are, at least the ones we have in an outside school.

Thursday is a GK test, so I suggested we begin a few days early preparing. They showed me three pages in their GK book. One is about animals, facts about several different animals and where they live. This included polar bear, jackal, pangolin, hyena, armadillo, gibbon, bactrian camel, and opossum. This evening we went online to look at images and a few videos of them. Then there is a page of water animals and fish, and last is the page I’ve copied below. Well, part of the page is here. There was even more. The task: to learn what these abbreviations mean. They don’t have to know anything about the subjects or the organizations, just the names and abbreviations.

I asked, “How will we find the answers?” I was concerned about how they would find all these names, how I would help them, but there was no reason to worry. They opened the book to the last pages and showed me all the answers to page 33. It’s how they had found all the names of the animals, from the back of the book. “Aha!” I said, and then asked them to leave a copy of the book with me so I could scan it.

To be learned for a test this week.

Next, the answers from the back of the book. They are random. I also had to explain the differences (?) between organizations, corporations, associations, companies, bureaus…. So these are the answers below and they have to make lists of the abbreviations and the names.

It’s now the 4th of July, night time, and today there was a crisis at the school. A teacher said to our girls, “You eat grass from a field?” Then, “Where do you find your teachers, on the road?” The girls have been demeaned a lot, and picked out as a special group for demeaning. Actually there is a lot of demeaning going on in the school. It seems to be the default attitude among some teachers. So I went to meet with the admin, and took Gibi along. I decided we would approach the school as “sad” and that was fairly effective. We got apologies, as the school admin does not want this kind of behavior. But it’s the culture of schools. This school has taken it seriously. They asked why I didn’t come earlier and I said simply I was afraid, and the girls were afraid that there would be retaliation. But today the girls broke down in class crying, and Ganga’s teacher saw them and called me.

Well, now at 11 pm they are still studying the abbreviations. I decided to help by organizing them by function… sports, tv/radio, science & education, etc. So this is my contribution.

The abbreviations organized in groups

I seem to have gotten a few wrong, but the girls corrected me. The girls had about three hours of Bangali and math homework before they could get to this.

It just hurts. One teacher refused to call them by name, referring to each one as Shishur Sevay. I tried to explain to the school that these attitudes are not conducive to studying or self confidence. I’m not sure it registered. I do believe though that the Founder, Principal, and Vice Principal with whom we met have taken us seriously and will try.

A few weeks ago we were working on a grant application and they asked us for what we thought were our three biggest accomplishments. Well, our biggest and best is that WE ARE HERE! We have survived five years. We continue to thrive and we keep taking one obstacle at a time, one day at a time, one test at a time… I know I keep repeating myself but I can’t stop thinking, “You eat grass?” This is about animals, cows, horses, sheep, goats, not children who have been abandoned and abused…. The words stay with me as I know they will stay with the girls, stacked on top of all the other demeaning and humiliating remarks that have been made to and about them. And tomorrow when they take this GK test, they will have to push all this from their minds and try to remember that RBI stands for Reserve Bank of India, and not Runs Batted In, which is what Maggie and I thought at first.